"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Convicted felon Brett Kimberlin is the nephew of a wealthy Maryland woman who has contributed to a foundation that helped fund a 501(c)3 organization of which Kimberlin is the director. Kimberlin’s activities have recently attracted widespread attention because of his attempts to intimidate and harass bloggers who wrote about his criminal history.

Harriet Crosby, 66, reportedly an heiress to the General Mills fortune, was one of the original donors to the Threshold Foundation, which contributed $20,000 to Kimberlin’s Justice Through Music Project in 2008, according to database research I reported May 19.

The Threshold Foundation was started by a group of wealthy devotees of environmentalism and trancendental meditation. The foundation’s “very liberal” view, researcher Ron Arnold has written, “saw American society as rife with injustice and in need of radical transformation.” Threshold has been affiliated with the Tides Foundation, linked to left-wing billionaire George Soros.

A 2009 profile of Crosby in the alumni magazine of the elite Putney School — a private academy in Vermont, where the annual tuition is $46,900 for boarding students — described her as “active” in the tax-exempt non-profit group Velvet Revolution, which Kimberlin helped start in association with liberal blogger Brad Friedman.

Velvet Revolution gained notoriety by making unsubstantiated claims that Republicans stole the 2004 presidential election through vote fraud. A 2007 Time magazine profile of Kimberlin described how he “found a home in the blogosphere” by “repeatedly asserting as fact things that are not true.” At one point, Kimberlin offered a $100,000 reward for proof of his assertion that President George W. Bush’s re-election was obtained through vote fraud, a reward that was never paid. Velvet Revolution has also unsuccessfully sought criminal prosecution of various public figures including GOP strategist Karl Rove, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the late New Media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart.

It was Allen’s writings about Kimberlin that resulted in him being the defendant in a lawsuit brought by Kimberlin. Allen’s lawyer, Aaron Worthing, subsequently drew attention to his own experiences with Kimberlin in a 28,000-word account on May 17.

The distinction I want to make absolutely clear is that the Transcendental Meditation organization has extremely high integrity and provides programs that deliver on its promises. The TM organization and the TM technique do not require any belief or faith at all because the TM technique works. What the TM organization has done since the 1970’s is do scientific research on the benefits of the TM technique to establish objectively what they are and to try to determine how they come about. Over a hundred of these studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Over 600 studies have been done and are published in several volumes edited by David Orme-Johnson.

I also want to make clear that it is wrong to suggest that people who practice the TM technique have been conned into doing it. That’s just not the case.

If you are only saying that idealistic people are more easily taken in than selfish people, then, yes, I will agree with that. This is why I never call liberals bad names — their more-equal overlords promise them a paradise and because they are so honest they don’t compare what they were promised with the tyranny that is delivered. Orwell’s “Animal Farm” describes the paradigm exactly: we are talking about the poor, duped animals in the barn.